NETACEA / WHITE PAPER
DNS VS JAVASCRIPT
DNS VS JAVASCRIPT FOREWORD | BACKGROUND | ENTERPRISE GRADE VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM | THE ALTERNATIVES | SUMMARY | ABOUT THE NETACEA VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM
Visual Diagram To illustrate an API Integration
FOREWORD Our adaptive API architecture supports a wide range of infrastructure from leading product vendors, allowing you to integrate our machine learning risk reduction into your existing platform of choice. The adaptive data model and micro-services API approach gives huge power and flexibility to ensure that even the most complex of visitor requirements can be elegantly and reliable handled at volume, using the existing infrastructure that enterprise customers already maintain and own. We complement existing controls such as WAF rulesets, rate limiting and threat databases, to provide deep analysis of all website visitors., through a practical use of A.I. to understand human and bot behaviours and adjust their website journey in real-time.
BACKGROUND Businesses face increasing pressure to stay relevant and competitive, mainly driven by the consumers that they serve. It’s become common place now that customers expect & demand your business to be accessible to them regardless of time or location. It’s this level of accessibility and on-demand consumerism that’s driving significant change in eCommerce. Netacea was founded on the principle that for many businesses, technical ability and performance mean the difference between success and failure and that is why our founders sought to meet the world’s demand for scalable technology. That is why the Netacea Virtual Waiting Room was created. The Netacea founders designed and implemented several bespoke online waiting systems for some of the most demanding retail and ticketing companies. It was through these experiences, observations and successes Netacea productised the most successful approach and built the Netacea Virtual Waiting Room – the world leading, non-skippable, secure queueing solution. NETACEA.COM
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ENTERPRISE GRADE VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM Any design decision must deliver both core requirements for a successful virtual waiting room, the queue must be: FAIR AND RELIABLE •
Customer satisfaction is of upmost importance. If there is no logic to the queue order or an issue arises that causes them to lose their place in the queue this causes immense dissatisfaction and damages brand reputation.
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The solution must therefore work in a chronological order, letting customers through in the order they arrived, and only when capacity is available.
SECURE AND NON-SKIPPABLE •
Tech-savvy customers and automated bot traffic will attempt to bypass the queue and gain direct access to the sale transaction.
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The solution must therefore manage all incoming traffic and cover all aspects of the web application infrastructure, not just specified pages.
THE DNS-BASED NETACEA VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM Having worked with some of Europe’s largest retailers as well as high-profile ticketing platforms and venues around the globe, Netacea is well equipped to not only help you prepare for peak online sale events, but also be your first line of defence from spikes in traffic or malicious bots. IMPLEMENTATION The cloud hosted Virtual Waiting Room operates at a DNS level and is implemented in front of your web-based application where it manages all incoming traffic therefore covering all aspects of the web application infrastructure, not just specific pages. Using DNS enables an easy and rapid implementation as it does not require any code changes to the website. By utilising a single redirection, Netacea covers all aspects of the web infrastructure, enabling larger enterprise customers to deploy to 10,000’s of sites in a single implementation. FULL STACK PROTECTION Sitting in front of the infrastructure allows the Virtual Waiting Room to provide additional protection for load balancers, Web Application Firewalls and app and database servers; not just the website. Inspecting all requests that pass in and out of the webserver ensures full visibility and control of all traffic and therefore ensures an accurate number of visitors on any part of a site at any one time. SECURITY AND SCALABILITY As with any enterprise class solution, the Virtual Waiting Room is not only secure, it’s completely scalable. Any requests that pass through the system are HTTPS encrypted and never stored, enabling us to be PCI compliant. The solution is hosted on highly available, distributed cloud infrastructure (with complete fail over protection) this has enabled it to achieve 100% availability since inception in 2014 and has been load tested to over 1 million concurrent users with no performance degradation.
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BENEFITS OF A DNS BASED SOLUTION COMPARED TO THE ALTERNATIVES INCREASED CONTROL - Only a DNS based approach will ensure full visibility and control of all traffic. All requests passing in and out of the system are inspected, enabling an accurate number of visitors on any part of the site at any one time. ENHANCED QUEUE SECURITY - Being in-line at a DNS level improves security by allowing you to restrict access to your system to only the IP addresses of the Netacea platform. This means that no one can bypass the Virtual Waiting Room. FULL STACK PROTECTION - By positioning the solution in the cloud in front the infrastructure you can provide protection for load balancers, web application firewalls, application and database servers, not just the website. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND TRUST - In-line DNS integrates as a seamless layer into the customers purchasing journey. Our customers do not have to worry about their buyers becoming suspicious of being directed to external URLs, e.g. www. VirtualWaitingRoom.CustomerWebsiteName.com EASY & SPEED OF IMPLEMENTATION - DNS does not require any code changes to the website, a single redirection covers all aspects of the web infrastructure, enabling our larger customers to deploy to 10,000’s sites in a single, rapid implementation. ACHIEVE COMPLIANCE - Requests pass through the solution as encrypted HTTPS traffic, but are not stored, enabling the solution to be both PCI and GDPR compliant. UNRIVALLED 100% WEBSITE UPTIME - Hosting the solution on a highly available, distributed cloud infrastructure with complete fail over protection has enabled a DNS solution to achieve 100% availability since inception. ULTRA-LOW LATENCY - Proven to perform all interactions sub 1ms in front of some of the world’s busiest websites. SUPERIOR SCALABILITY - Further to customer reports, DNS solutions have been load tested to over 2 million concurrent users with no sign of performance degradation or instability. GUARANTEED BUSINESS USER ACCESS - The ability to whitelist specific users or locations ensures that no in-store or call centre employee is placed within a waiting room when trying to place a customer order or access stocking information. INSTANT ACCESS FOR VIP CUSTOMERS - Returning or high-spend customers can be rewarded with guaranteed direct access to the website in any given situation, rewarding those loyal to your business. INSTANT REMOVAL - The DNS based solution, combined with Netacea’s passive mode functionality, allows for the Virtual Waiting Room to be instantly added or removed to your website at the click of a button.
Visual Diagram To illustrate Implementation
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THE ALTERNATIVES There are other approaches to establish a waiting room system such as using Client-side JavaScript, your CDN or even within your existing infrastructure. We considered these and eliminated them from our design process for reasons specified below.
CLIENT-SIDE JAVASCRIPT This solution involves you as a customer inserting some JavaScript into your website which is used to make a call to the waiting room to determine if the user is known, and if it should be granted access to the website or redirected to a waiting room page. While this is a perfectly valid way to establish if a waiting room is needed, there are some fundamental flaws with this methodology: LOSS OF DECISION MAKING CONTROL Firstly, the decision on whether access to the website should be granted or not is moved to the connecting customer which removes the decision-making control from you and passes it to the end user. In simple terms, this means that the user can see and potentially manipulate what the JavaScript is doing, making this solution easy to bypass by using various ad blocking tools or a simple modification to the Host File. IS NOT 100% SECURE AND NON-SKIPPABLE Through working with existing customers and our own testing, Netacea are yet to find a JavaScript based virtual waiting room that could not be bypassed and gain direct access to a website. INFRASTRUCUTRE OVERLOAD PRIOR TO QUEUE INITITATION There is very high potential that the webservers could become overloaded before the JavaScript queue has been initiated, causing a webserver crash. The initial page containing the JavaScript must be successfully loaded, the JavaScript executed and return the completed result from the originating client for the virtual waiting room to be initiated. In the event of a flash sale or a huge spike in traffic, the webservers could very easily buckle under the load before the client-side scripts have chance to execute and the users re-directed to the waiting room page.
CDN BASED SYSTEMS CDNs by design are distributed systems and, because of this, they cannot offer a unified view of the current user levels on a system or manage a potential waiting room scenario fairly. NO ‘FIRST IN, FIRST OUT’ FUNCTIONALITY Virtual waiting rooms based in the CDN layer tend to use a “next returning user” rather than a “first in, first out” approach to processing waiting users. Meaning, unfortunately, that the first person in the queue isn’t always the first person out of it and onto the website. REQUIRES CONTSTANT MANUAL ADMINISTRATION CDN based virtual waiting rooms do not use a fixed waiting room threshold, instead they use a percentage ruleset whereby a set percentage of traffic is always re-directed to a waiting room regardless of the visitor numbers.
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The result of this approach is that as the amount of traffic hitting your website increases, so does the amount of traffic that hits your webserver. In other words, the amount of traffic being allowed to hit your site is flexible depending on load whereas your servers have a fixed capacity regardless of load. The upshot of this is that in the case of a traffic spike, an administrator would need to constantly monitor and (where necessary) reduce the percentage of traffic allowed though to the website during peak loads, and then continue monitoring to increase that percentage again when the amount of traffic reduces.
IN-HOUSE INFRASTRUCTURE Configuring your web application(s) &/or load balancers to deal with a waiting room scenario can potentially yield mixed results. Issues will more than likely still occur as all traffic is still hitting your existing infrastructure without the flow control at the perimeter that a DNS-based solution would provide. By implementing the virtual waiting room in this manner, it’s all too common for the solution to end up behind the bottleneck(s) that are causing the problem and will therefore compound the issue and not solve the problem correctly. With in-house implementations differing in customisation and configuration, a larger amount of time and resources will be required. For example, website owners will need to manage additional failure points within the deployment increasing risk, therefore adding more complexity than is necessary and reduces the overall effectiveness of the solution.
SUMMARY It has never been more important to ensure 100% website availability. In a digital world of streaming, consumers are accustomed to gaining access to information, entertainment and items of desire in near real time. Failure to provide immediate access to website shops, limited edition product ranges and discounted sales events can be detrimental to brand reputation and repeat custom. Even a one second delay in load time can result in a 7% loss in conversions and a two second delay during a transaction results in shopping card abandonment rates of up to 87% as customers fear something has gone wrong with the transaction and abandon their purchase. Psychology research has proven when people experience a period of waiting with no explanation as to why they are waiting or how long they are going to wait, it feels longer than waiting for the same period when they have been told how long they can expect to wait. Nobody likes waiting, so when selecting a Virtual Waiting Room solution, select one that matches your business objectives, and one that makes the waiting process as fair, transparent and painless as possible. Selecting a proven, scalable Virtual Waiting Room solution will protect the uptime, availability and performance of web applications. Therefore, will help maximise customer transactions and safeguard brand reputation through customisable access rules during spikes in traffic.
HOW IT WORKS When the maximum number of visitors is reached, Netacea delivers a waiting page to all additional visitors without any access to your servers. Your servers only ever see visitors that you know they can handle so the Netacea Virtual Waiting Room offers genuine protection for your servers and quality of service to your site visitors.
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ABOUT THE NETACEA VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM Netacea’s Virtual Waiting Room solution controls the flow of website visitors allowing through only the visitors your website can handle. By putting all additional visitors into a fair, first-in-first-out waiting room we ensure that all visitors get the best possible experience and you make the most money. In short, Netacea Virtual Waiting Room ensures that your site remains available 24/7 no matter how busy it gets. Netacea’s Virtual Waiting Room is a scalable, cloud-based service that sits in front of your website and controls access for all visitors.
Visual Diagram To illustrate the Queuing Process
Netacea provides advanced insight and visibility into your web traffic, allowing you to create powerful actions based on deep machine learning insight, using APIs. Visit Netacea.com to find out more.
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